 Harper Audio presents The Mysterious World of the Human Genome by Frank Ryan, read by Matt Bates. Possibly I am a scientist because I was curious when I was young. I can remember being 10, 11, 12 years old and asking, Now, why is that? Why do I see such a peculiar phenomenon? I would like to understand that. Minus Pauling. Introduction. No special act of creation, no spark of life was needed to turn dead matter into living things. The same atoms composed them both, arranged only in a different architecture. Jacob Bronofsky, The Identity of Man. Bronofsky begins his more famous book, The Ascent of Man, with the words, Man is a singular creature. He has a set of gifts which make him unique among the animals so that, unlike them, he is not a figure in the landscape, he is a shaper of the landscape. But why should we humans have become shapers of the landscape rather than mere figures inhabiting it? We differ from, say, a seahorse or a cheetah because our genetic inheritance, the sum of the DNA that codes for us, is different in humans when compared to the horse or the cheetah. We call this the genome, or to be more specific in our case, the human genome. Our genome defines us at the most profound level. That same genome is present in every one of the approximately 100,000 billion cells that make us who we are as individual members of the human species. But it runs deeper than that. In more personal terms, in myriad tiny variations that we each possess and are individual to us only, it is the very essence of us. All that in genetic and hereditary terms we have to contribute to our offspring, and through them, to the sum total evolutionary inheritance of our species. To understand it is to know, in the most intimate sense, what it means to be human. No two people in the world today have exactly the same genome. Even identical twins, who will have been conceived with exactly the same genome, will have developed tiny differences between their genomes by the time of their births. Differences that may have arisen in parts of their genomes that don't actually code for what we normally mean by genes. How strange for us to realize that there is actually more to our individual genome than genes alone. But let us put aside such details for the moment to focus on the more general theme. How could a relatively simple chemical code give rise to the complexity of a human being? How could our human genome- Sample complete. Ready to continue?